mirror

As objective and unbiased as a flat mirror, showing you, on the wall, just who you are.

Urban awakening

Oh, I am better than you. You do not fit in here, mostly you fit in everywhere else. Smart, straight and able, but here you are not welcome.

But, I mean you no harm.

We will talk of tragic figures: the eighteen-year old kid, gay with HIV who works the Tenderloin, 6th street, fucked up off herion and methamphetamine. There are so many without the stability of money and love and good friends. So, really, you see, you don't belong here.

Well, I want to help. This is a good cause. No, I do not personally know those that suffer with HIV and addiction and spurned by my family. Do you see within me some insincerity? Is it that clear at the end of the day I will return to a relatively privilaged set of six days and 20 hours before I am here again feeling dejected. I suppose I deserve it. You can make me feel this way, cause the rest would never.

Look at you. You are so weak. Everything to live for, so much that could be done with you, but look at you.

The bench is low to the ground and green. It is 8ft long and made of closely spaced 4 inch by 4 inch pieces of soft wood, probably pine. It is nearly noon, but the sun is almost down, or maybe it seems that way. You would think that the position of the sun would make haunting natural sense to humans, since it has been around since we've had eyes. As modern as we are, I guess we've got no use for these natural phenomena to make sense anymore. The sun is warm, though, radiating a strange, slanted heat. Nothing feels quite as good, I think as I dip out of the negative mental tar pit I've been fighting to move in all day.

The bench is so low that I can extend my feel a good distance in front of me. In front of me lies Duboce park, a velt of green course grass, lined with low bushy trees that don't loose their leaves, three blocks long and a half block wide. Maybe there was a time were kids played stick-ball or soccer or tag here, when this neighborhood was filled young families. Presently it smells overwhelmingly of multiple-wet dog, dog piss and dog shit. The warm sun is actually cooking the excrement of a thousand different dogs; the odor is...unique. Times beening what they are in these urban areas people can only afford to have dogs. For this reason I do not loath the smell or current cainine occupation of this park. I sit with my book, the first hundred or so pages are crunchy and warped--I dropped it in the bath tub. But, I cannot read. The dogs, most of them smaller than a large rabbit, are running and bouncing and nipping at eachothers hunches. A small white cumulus cloud, bright red tongue hanging out anteriorly, moves across the grass with out aid of legs. Or so it seems. These silly dogs are so blissfully unaware of the War, global warming, my waning trust in people, my parents financial situation, the crime rate in Oakland, the fact that they stink. They just do what they do, mostly ignoring their owners. This makes me laugh and smile, a bit.

It is 12:17pm. The N-line stops at the western end of the park, just before it enters a tunnel boared under Beuna Vista park. I'm getting on a street car going east: downtown. It is Sunday and I'm going to Needle Exchange.

I walk across the park, dodging dogs and their frantic owners, and move to the other side of the tracks. My crunchy book makes me look educated as I wait for the arrivial of the train. The "brrrriinnngg" of the street car's bell shouts from the opening of the tunnel: that was quick. It is full, of course. I've never been able to predict the when the N-line will be full of people goign downtown. It is not as straight-forward as a rush hour phenomenon. It is noon on a Sunday: it is full.

My last quarter misses the slot on the fare machine and falls unreachable between the machine and the operator's door. He--an older black man with distinguished salt and pepper curls--gives me a transfer slip and waves me off. I grab some aluminum ceiling bar and bury my nose in my obviously-once-wet book.

You see every type of person on the San Francisco MUNI. It is really something amazing. Today a young persian(I think) girl escorting her grandmother caught my attention.

The street car dipped down into the tunnel that runs under Market street. It jerked. Someone almost fell over onto an old asian woman. Typical goings on for a ride on the N.

Civic Center stop is my stop. I am birthed from the train, squeezing out between to large white men who apparently didn't understand the foot traffic inhibitory effects of blocking a doorway. Next, I parry a polite tourist who has stopped directly in front of the train door to snap an ingeniously mundane picture of the station signage. I'm in a surly mood as I let the escalator bring me heavenward.

Today, I will be giving clean needles and clean works to people who will do one of three things with them. 1) They or someone they're with will use them and bring the dirty needles back. 2) They will give them to someone who needs clean works. 3) They will sell them for nearly nothing (of course that is something to some of these folks).

The second escalator brings me into a world of sun and tents and the sound of water being shot against concrete. The tents belong to the weekly farmers market that sets up in Civic center plaza on Sundays. I stroll by boothes of organic egg farmers, piles of asian and unrecognizable vegetables, and homeless people. They are not there for a hand out, but to mere hangout. That is, apparently, what they do. I'm not being provokatively insensitive--these are the people I've grown to appreciate and care for. I am stating an actual fact.

Walking across the plaza, the sound of water becomes colorful in my right ear. Glancing in that direction I see the fountain: a retangle depression in which sit loitering and louging cubic columns of marble. These chunks are being constantly showered with water, spouting up from unknown, unseen nozzels. A man and a child walk in the depression of the fountain(ignoring a sign forbiding just that). I pass behind one of the two walls that bound the back side of the fountain and, for the second time that day, my nose is filled with piss-vapors. This time it is human. It bothers me only slightly, mostly because I've walked by this very spot and smelt this very odor many Sandays. On the lawn bordering the wide brick walkway perpendicular to Grove st. two homeless people eye me. Two black man to my right talk to a closed glass door. I just mind my own business.

As I hike up the sligh incline to the corner of Golden Gate Ave. and Larkin St. grey metal baracades line the sidewalk. There is the occasional used needle lying forsaken on the concrete, offen with the point missing or broken off. I know I'm close. A black homeless man who looks farmiliar sits propped up against a baracade, his legs streched across the sidewalk, his hands clasped over his stomache and his face in the warm sun. Quietly, I plod past.

So much has been written about the homeless and street culture of America, and probably 50% of what has been documented has come from the hands of writers in SF. It is really the most habitable of cities for the homeless. Here is a non-exhaustive list of reasons to be homeless in San Francisco, if you are to be homeless at all: the weather is agreeable, never getting below 45 F; the social services are fabulous, I've never heard of a homeless person dying of starvation in this city; public transportation is easily accessable and goes almost everywhere in the city; people are nice and generous here, especially the tourists. I remember seeing homeless peopl huddled up on exhaust grates in DC when I was in the fifth grade. Today, I would stir them and advise them to hope a freight train to SF.

TARC is situated in a building whose purpose was once retail, but I am not sure. The area which we have the needle exchange resembles a store front, with plate glass windows. It is really no bigger than the standard size vestibule were you are blasted with hot air before entering. When I arrive, I am early and the door is locked. Tammy (no real names within), a man to women transgender, sits at a table busying herself with gloved hands. She is preparing hundreds of small baggies of tiny cotten balls.

"Hey Matt! Where have you been?"

"Oh! Hey Tammy. I was at home."

"Glad you're back! No one knew where you were."

"Dan didn't know? I told him I would be gone for the next three Sundays."

"He had no idea."

"Well, I'm back. Sorry about the confusion."

There is a lot of confusion at the Needle Exchange. The are things that really matter when you deal with life and death and disease. Scheduling is one of those things that falls by the way side. There is no money paid to some people who will be helping with the operation today; we are volunteers. The people who do get paid are stretched so thin for time and resources. It was slighty touching and alittle worrying that I was missed. They must have been sort-staffed.

Tammy has been working since 9am filling preparing cotten and vitamin C packets. I grab the vitamine C packets and start placing "TARC" labels on them.

Before I go further I want to give a run down of the supplies we make available at the Needle Exchange:

The mainstay of any syringe exchange program is, naturally, sterile syringes.

1. Insulin syringes
1. 27 5/8 gauge needle with 1cc capacity syringe. Know as "longs" on the street, because the needle length is longer than the "shorts". More frequent IV users needle the extra length to hit deeper veins.
   
2. 28 gauge needle with 1cc capacity syringe. Know as "shorts", the standard.
3. 28 gauge needle with 1/2cc capacity syringe. Know as "micros".
   
2. Larger syringings aka Musclers
   
1. 23 gauge x 1 in needle with a 3cc cap. syringe. People that use these bad-boys are hitting deep into muscle tissue for they are out of usable surface veins. If you think you could never run out of veins, think again. I once watched a phlebotomist stick a recovered IV drug user for a good 5 minutes until she found a usable vein. The guy was clean for 15 years... they didn't come back.
2. 23 gauge x 1.5 in needle with a 3cc cap. syringe. Even worst shape then the people above, the people who ask for these I really really worry about.

Supplies aka "works"

Clean supplies for preparing and using IV drugs. Three main IV drugs: herion, crack/cocaine and methamphetamine.

1. Cookers: clean small aluminum containers about the size of a large bottle cap, but deeper. Heat is applied to the underside to aid in solvation of the solid.
   
2. Tourniquets: clean, rubber, funny-smelling. People were using (and reusing) dirty rope.
3. Alcohol Prep pads: For injection site sterilization.
4. Sterile water in small one-use 3ml capsules: For dissolving drugs for IV use. Better than tap water. For better read: cleaner.
5. Tiny spun cotton balls: For filtering large debris from the drug solution when being drawn into the syringe. Before the use of spun cotton, users would employ cotton balls for filtering. Fibers of cotton would be drawn up in the filtering and injected in the vein, which would quickly elicit an immune response resulting in a condition know as "cotton fever".
   
6. Triple Anti-biotic oinment: Reduces local tissue infection. Absesses are a common problem for IV drug user.
   
7. Vitamin C (Ascorbic acid) powder: Its presence in water creates the acidic conditions needed to dissolve the chemically basic crack/cocaine for IV use. It is harmless to inject, especially compared with lemon juice or Kool-aid powder. IV drug users who were using lemon juice were going blind from a fungus present in the juice that would attack the optic nerve.

The Needle Exchange goes as normal. The figures shuffle in toward the survey table. We take no names, just ages, sexual preference, gender (all 4), race, HIV status and number of needles to be returned. We stopped having them fill out the dates and printed them directly on the forms. Too many of them had to ask what the date was. Most of them, when told, would say "Is it July already?" and, in some more astonishing cases, "it's 2006?". I wish I were exagerating.